Five Red Herrings: A Positronic Book (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781515471356)

When celebrated artist Sandy Campbell is found dead beside a stream in the Scottish village of Kirkcudbright, suspicion immediately falls upon the small circle of painters with whom he spent his time. Campbell was quarrelsome, arrogant, and thoroughly capable of making enemies-and on the day of his death, six men had reasons to resent him. Five of them are telling the truth. One is not. Lord Peter Wimsey arrives to find a mystery built from conflicting alibis, railway timetables, bicycles, paint boxes, and the movements of six possible suspects. The evidence appears to point in several directions at once, and every convincing solution seems to produce another contradiction. To uncover the murderer, Wimsey must reconstruct not merely what happened, but exactly where each man was and what he was doing during the crucial hours surrounding Campbell's death.

Set amid the artists, fishing streams, roads, and railway lines of southwestern Scotland, Five Red Herrings is one of Dorothy L. Sayers's most elaborate exercises in detection. Combining a tightly engineered puzzle with sharp characterization and a vivid sense of place, it challenges both Wimsey and the reader to separate one genuine clue from a maze of plausible deception.